


Someone Else's Shoes

by westwoodandridingcrops



Series: 2nd Sheriarty 30 Day Challenge [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asphyxiation, Blood and Violence, Hallucinations, M/M, Restraints, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 17:50:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11514393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwoodandridingcrops/pseuds/westwoodandridingcrops
Summary: In which Sherlock is visited by the ghosts of his past, present, and future.





	Someone Else's Shoes

**Author's Note:**

> For the 'Dreams' prompt for the 2nd Sheriarty 30 Day Challenge

_Weston’s cap-toe oxfords, black leather, 10, sort of rounded, the barest scuff on the front corner of the right heel._  

* * *

He has to blink at them, the shoes, once, very slowly and very slightly. He still feels as though he’s seeing everything through his eyelashes, the swelling in his eyelid weighing it down and forcing him to only slit his eyes open. Sherlock groans, half from the general waves of pounding pain that wash over him each time something moves him by accident and half because, for a moment, it’s the only sound that he can muster. 

  
He begins to form a series of syllables at the front of his cracked lips, but before intent can translate into a complete word, he is shushed ever so patiently.  
  
“You’re only hurting yourself,” the Oxfords remark casually, as all the ambient noise from upstairs goes silent.  
  
Bent over as he is, he tries to raise his head before what he assumes is some sort of hairline cervical fracture forces him to let himself sink forward again, this time with a much more agitated, impatient cry.  
  
“You are,” the Oxfords remark, placidly. “And to think, you might have already been home. You were so very nearly there. You could have hopped on a train in Berlin and been home in time to make your apologies to John Watson over dinner, but instead, here you are caught up in your last-minute, impromptu diversion.”  
  
“Well? Are you diverted?”  
  
“D….diverted?” he begins incredulously, intending to defend the point regardless of his circumstances.  
  
“Yes, Sherlock, a diversion. You managed to escape unscathed from each one of your best attempts at needlessly endangering yourself and that led you to conclude that your luck would hold out forever and, frankly, I’m tired of repeating that very same sentence to you.”  
  
“Evidently not,” he hears himself say with difficulty. His brother’s been the voice of reproof in his mind for so long that the facsimile is perfect, but for the absence of any of the grime of this place on his heels.  
  
He almost hears Mycroft smile faintly and disdainfully, the way he sometimes does in response to Sherlock’s sarcasm “Since you’ve solved that puzzle, I imagine you’ve realized that this is all very by the book.”  
  
“The American manual. They’re not very creative.” Sherlock replies, he’s not sure after how long.  
  
“Quite. Which means that failing your admission that you really are Albanian and really are a spy,…”  
  
“They’ll try to push boundaries. Then, they won’t even mean for it to happen, it just will.”  
  
Immediately, the weight of the wrong tense hangs between them like it once did over the shades in the meaning of verbs in Latin books at home. Not future, Sherlock, not will. Present passive, third person singular. Happens, does happen, is happening.  
  
“Oh, Sherlock. Why get involved in the first place, little brother?”  
  
“Because, big brother, you wouldn’t have. Go away.”

* * *

_Black patent leather pumps, 6½, 120 cm stiletto heel, trademark red-lacquered soles, lovingly cared for, hardly ever worn for very long._  

* * *

“Right on the first count, wrong on the second, Mr. Holmes. I actually wear them entirely throughout, sometimes. The heel has its uses.”  
  
He briefly wrinkles his brow in confusion at her presence. At her presence, specifically.  
  
“You?” he brings his lips together barely enough to ask.  
  
“Of course.” He hears the slight smile in her voice and hurts himself in the effort to move his head to the right a centimeter or so.  
  
“Oh, don’t be that way,” she says, in response to his attempt to quite literally shake his head of her, “Allow a woman her last chance at a date.”  
  
“Date?” He thinks more than he enunciates aloud.  
  
“Mmmhm. A date. Fifteen minutes, maybe less if you play your cards well.”  
  
His thoughts go sluggishly after the tail end of something that sounds like the beginning of an escape plan, his brain perhaps finally cooperating and doing something useful rather than just transmitting each painful impulse of his body. He begins to pay attention before—  
  
“Meet me upstairs.”  
  
“Ah,” he says, once he’s understood the sort of escape plan this is.  
  
“No?” He watches the heels step and click apart, as she must cross her arms above his sight line. “You protest far too eagerly, I’m afraid. Call it a trade secret, but I can always hear the ‘yes’ inside of a…”  
  
“No,” he repeats, but it comes to him as more a rejection of the discussion than a decisive answer. If there’s going to be an argument, he’s already lost it.  
  
“And why not?” she counters quickly, for all the world sounding as though she really were just cajoling him into dinner. The air vibrates with her soft and affected hum of amusement.  
  
“What wouldn’t I have done to have had you this way in London. It’s an effective position for my purposes and theirs. You’ve hung here too long, though. Your shoulders have dislocated again, you’ve lost track of how long you’ve been awake now, and you’re suffocating. You’re certainly not getting yourself down. What have you to lose? Make them take you upstairs.”  
  
“To lose?” He rasps out, repeating the question and suddenly arguing in earnest with this ghost.  
  
“Nothing at all. Fifteen minutes. If you told them what they expect to hear, perhaps. Or, if you were particularly infuriating. That big brute has a temper, I think. Bring up his wife and her sweetheart just so, it might not even last that long."  
  
He can’t argue against her methodology. It’s an effective one. It takes into consideration that he has no means to die where he is but for the way in which he is already dying. The anxiety of finding his next breath makes it increasingly more futile to argue against that assertion, too. He really is feeling himself die. He’s entirely consumed by the task of watching spots dance before his eyes as he balances the need to breathe with the feeling of his arms separating from the rest of his body.  
  
“It’ll hurt,” he finally says when he can’t think through any better arguments.  
  
“Well, of course.” She grants, with an unexpected and profound gentleness that aches him. “But that’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? Every needle ever slipped into yourself hurt, just like all these heroic adventures since then, if you’re honest. But then again my appointment book does stay full, doesn’t it? It may hurt, but…”  
  
His breath catches as his bones briefly leave their sockets. When he can no longer stand to keep from exhaling, he admits breathlessly, “…worth it.”  
  
He can’t carry on this conversation much longer, he thinks after the Louboutins disappear. He can’t afford to.

* * *

_Tan brogues, 11½, not at all taken care of, barely put away in the right place each time. Scuffed slightly less on the right from a short-lived limp. Welted leather._  

* * *

This time, he is at once delirious enough to welcome the visit and lucid enough to scoff playfully even when the words simply don’t come.  
  
“ ’Welted leather,' " the brogues repeat the bitter play on words. He’s earned himself a reluctantly warm chuckle from them, as he sometimes does. “S’not funny.”  
  
“Bit.” He puts his lips together but he hardly makes any noise, like someone at prayer. He doesn’t have the option of much else.  
  
“Yeah, alright. If you like.”  
  
He wants to ask him questions and to compare notes with him. He yearns for the familiarity of this interaction with John when he would try to gauge whether his experience was normal and, all at once, interrogate why what is normal is normal. John seems to catch on to this, in the way he sometimes did.  
  
“ 'Please, God. Let me live.’ I’m not sure why I said that. I think I just said that because anything else would have sounded weird to Greg.”  
  
“No?”  
  
“No. I don’t know that people do a lot of thinking in times like that. Most people, anyway. People that do usually have a reason to go home.”  
  
The unreasoning and unbounded pleasure that he’s having at this particular hallucination is dulled somewhat by the slight accusation in that. Then again, that gratifies him, too. He’s missed feeling mildly guilted by John.  
  
“It wasn’t like this for me, though.” John picks to press on. “It would have been faster. And I didn’t have a good reason.”  
  
“Good?” he tries to reaffirm, a little surprised and a little pathetically even to his own ears.  
  
“Yeah.” He imagines warm, sweater clad shoulders shrugging in concession. “Much better reason than we had. If me-in-London knew, I’d come around to it, eventually. I’d be angry about you lying, but I don’t think I’m ever going to find out. Still, I’d understand.”  
  
The nostalgia at John’s anger, but eventual acceptance, his disapproval at Sherlock’s methods but hard-won approval at his results suffuses him with satisfaction.  
  
“But…” He feels he should point out, in all fairness.  
  
“But you tried. That counts for something. Mycroft’s going to be angry now. He’ll say it’s your own fault for trying to save them but then the paper will say that the UK’s come out in full-force against Serbia’s trafficking problem.”  
  
“Think so?” He thinks to test the feeling before allowing himself to luxuriate in the satisfaction of a job declared well-done.  
  
“Hope so. It’s a good cause. They sort of implied as much before we left, but I never saw anyone actually feel that way. But this? No, this is good.”  
  
“Good,” he repeats. “Good,” he decides.

* * *

_Penny loafers. 7½ and even so, still, too wide. Black. Gucci. Shined to the point of obscenity._

* * *

 “I understand the obsession,” Sherlock startles back, painfully, expecting nothing else but his own death. Recognizing him, he believes for a moment that this may be evidence of some hidden connection between Serbia and his previous adventure. Perhaps, he thinks in the space of a millisecond, the curtain will peel back and a grand explanation of how he’s lost will begin. He finds, though, that he doesn’t have quite enough energy to care.  
  
“Shoes, and all. What are you up to these days, Sir Galahad?”  
  
_You._  
  
His throat’s too tight and obstructed to say this aloud. This, he hears within his own skull, his old voice as he imagines it must have sounded.  
  
“Not really. This is reaching. When it started, it was about me and you and no one else until you decided to improvise a Crimestoppers World Tour all by yourself.”  
  
_Should I not have turned around, then? After everything I’ve seen these past three years, should I have pretended that it wasn’t possible for me to stop it?_  
  
“Doesn’t sound like there would have been much pretending involved. Is this you stopping it?”  
  
He’s past the point of forming full sentences in his mind, it feels closer to directing general thoughts at this manifestation. In this case, he doesn’t wish to spend his last moments thinking of failure. He’d rather think of nothing at all.  
  
“That’s the thing with martyrs, though isn’t it? You can’t really win because then you wouldn’t be a martyr.”  
  
_I can promise you, I had no intention of being one._  
  
“No, really, I would know. There was definitely more than one painting of a beautiful boy all twisted up, naked, and about to die in my upbringing. You’re doing a fantastic job.”  
  
_Must I be mocked now? On top of everything else?_  
  
“That’s your fault, not mine. Teasing you only ever gets you going and you have always been so remarkably easy to tease.”  
  
_Pointless, then. I’m not going anywhere now._  
  
“If that’s what you really want, let me not admit impediments. Just die.”  
  
_In peace, please?_  
  
“Not a chance, sweetness. I didn’t get to last time. This time, I’m going to watch.”  
  
_This is miserable._  
  
“No. This is your bed you’re lying in. How are you still this slow, Sherlock? Don’t you know by now?”  
  
Peace is all he really wants. He wants to be left alone, he’d begun enjoying the feeling of his brain going offline. He wishes to concentrate on the focus that it’ll all end soon, and could, but for the niggle of this intrusion. This intrusion irritates him, brings him back to the desperation of asphyxiation.  
  
_My God. What? What don’t I know?_  
  
“Not everything that feels like it’s killing you is really killing you. You _should_ know that by now. The only people who jump to that conclusion are the people who want to. And you did want to jump, didn’t you? Didn’t you appreciate all that effort?”  
  
_Thank you?_   He offers nearly hysterical, uncomprehending of why his brain has picked now to put him through this rather than the quiet darkening he’d been promised.  
  
“For?”  
  
_Killing me?_ He’s close now, and just wants to sleep, and he will think whatever it takes to make this stop if it promises to stop.  
  
“Please. You could have done that yourself. You’ve only been trying since you were 17.”  
  
_Then?_  
  
“Then? Then, why leave lists in strategic places for Mycroft to find?”  
  
_I didn’t want to die!_ He explodes finally.  
  
“Oh, of course, you didn’t.” Jim triumphs. “Your boredom, your pointlessness, all your weird little heartbreaks and your moral dilemmas. You like dressing it up in self-sacrifice and all sorts of things but you don’t really want to die. You’re just afraid of accepting that it’s going to feel like this. Weren’t you at least a little pleased, on your way down, that you’d called ahead for that blue bag?”  
  
He can’t breathe anymore. It feels final, truly and finally, just as he’s come to the realization that perhaps he isn’t prepared for this, after all, it feels on the very verge of happening. Gasping shallowly, like a landed fish, he’s almost angry at himself for not having just died and missed Jim entirely.  
  
Suddenly, it feels more physical than it had before. He can almost bring himself to see, really see, the light gray fabric of the same suit he’d worn to the courthouse over his knees. The crouch down in good trousers to position them almost level with each other. He feels the tangible weight of emphasis and, for a moment, it distracts him.  
  
_Why now?_   He pleads, a little more calmly. _Why you?_  
  
“It isn’t hypocrisy, Sherlock, it’s what I wanted.” Distance again. He rises to his feet, leaving only the vulgar gleam of the black leather. “I was already done with everything else and you certainly weren’t leaving me any other options.”  
  
“Besides,” he pauses, his voice having taken on something of that smooth, tantalizing way that never failed to hypnotize Sherlock, “This is better than anything else that could have been. It’s done now, no takebacks. This way, I only ever see you when you’re all naked and raw. This way, I get much more than I would have gotten any other way. This way, I get to penetrate your _brain_.”  
  
It’s different than the comfort of John’s familiar words. It’s more like the recognition that, despite his best intentions and any possible effort to the contrary, this is true, has been true for some time, and will continue to be true. The next breath feels unbiddenly bigger somehow, and the ensuing popping noise and stab of pain threaten him with a wave of nausea that he doesn’t feel capable of standing. He keeps his eyes from rolling back into his head and soon finds that despite how horrifically and how acutely his retching tugs at his arms he evidently is able to stand it. He is hanging from the ropes that hold him, less by his ligaments and muscles and more by the skin that happens to encase both his torso and his arms, and Jim’s right, it’s killing him but he isn’t dying. Even the motion of his heart against his ribs hurts his shoulders, he’s sure of it, but he’s vomiting, and it’s shocking him into breathing between heaves. Paradoxically, the fact that his shoulders are so far pulled away from him eases the compression around his chest. He must look so much worse than before, but he is gasping greedily through the pain and taking a deranged glee in the idea of getting sick all around Jim’s fictional shoes.  
  
“Good.” He hears Jim coach over his gagging. “Good.”  
  
When he’s done, he’s still wheezing audibly with each breath, but eventually, it subsides into panting and he realizes he’s not standing quite so close to the brink anymore. He can make it until they come back downstairs for him. He can wait again.  
  
“Now figure out how to get home. I’ll let you know when you can finish, one day. Right now, though, I’m not done, myself.”


End file.
